16:30 - 18:00
Parallel sessions 6
16:30 - 18:00
Room: C-Building - N14
Chair/s:
Jan Tünnermann, Iris Wiegand
In visual foraging, people search continuously for multiple targets across space and time. Perceptual, attentional, and decision-making processes act together to efficiently collect visual targets from dynamic environments. This symposium addresses how flexibly humans adapt their behaviour in these complex search tasks akin to many real-world search scenarios. Thornton and Kristjánsson will discuss the impact of grouping on “foraging for change” when searching in time-varying environments. Kristjánsson et al. investigate whether cross-modal synchrony cues influence foraging. Sauter and Tünnermann demonstrate how statistical learning guides the discovery of spatiotemporal hotspots in dynamic foraging tasks, highlighting sensitivity to environmental regularities. Hughes and Clarke present advances in modelling foraging behaviour to capture the dynamics of target selection. Finally, Wiegand shows that a foraging task with memory load can uncover both cognitive impairments, as well as compensatory strategies, in patients with Korsakoff syndrome and alcohol use disorder. Together, these contributions demonstrate how adaptive foraging behaviour emerges in response to the complex demands of dynamic, interactive environments.
Submission 486
Modelling Search Order and Patch Leaving Decisions in Visual Foraging
SymposiumTalk-04
Presented by: Anna Hughes
Anna Hughes 1, Alasdair Clarke 1, Mackenzie Siesel 2, 3, Walden Li 2, Andrew Leber 2
1 Department of Psychology, University of Essex, United Kingdom
2 Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, United States
3 Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, United States
Many recent visual foraging studies have focused on the cognitive processing while participants select targets within a patch: for instance, they have focused on how the perceived value of targets affects selection decisions, or how people make choices between sticking with the same target type or switching to another. We have built a generative Bayesian model (FoMo) that can make relatively accurate target-by-target predictions during foraging tasks. However, a separate strand of foraging research has focused on the question of when people terminate their search in a given area to move onto a new foraging patch. Here, we use a difficult foraging paradigm where participants collect “L-shaped” targets among Ts in either exhaustive blocks (where they must find all ten targets on each trial) or inexhaustive blocks (where they can move on at any point during a given trial but must collect a certain number of targets in total in the block). We then use the results from this paradigm to extend FoMo to allow it to make patch-leaving predictions. We compare our results to other approaches to understanding patch-leaving behaviour (such as Marginal Value Theorem) and discuss how our methods can help to bring together previously disparate parts of the visual foraging literature.